Tag Archives: East Neuk Festival

East Neuk: Rasumovsky Day

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Kilrenny Church & Crail Church, Fife.

Saturday was Rasumovsky Day at the 21st East Neuk Festival. In three concerts, spread three hours apart over two venues, each of Beethoven’s three middle period Op 59 Quartets – a groundbreaking collection commissioned by the violin-playing Russian ambassador in Vienna, Count Rasumovsky – was rolled out by three successive ensembles. 

That each quartet had its unique proponent was itself thrilling enough. The cliff-edge lunchtime volatility of Spain’s Cuarteto Quiroga in Op 59 No 1, answered by the mid-afternoon meaty intensity of the American Calidore Quartet in No 2, then took early evening flight with the virtuosic joie de vivre of Swedish-Norwegian string quartet Opus13. 

Furthermore, each Rasumovsky was partnered by a non-Beethoven work intended to illuminate the contextual response, which the elemental theatrics of Spain’s short-lived Beethoven contemporary Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga’s Quartet No 3, the dichotomy of intellectual constructivism and expressive fluidity of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Arietta (UK premiere) and the heated, personalised Romanticism of Wilhelm Stenhammar’s A minor Quartet Op 25 respectively achieved.

Throw all that together and the result was an invigorating, at times intoxicating, complexity of stimuli that succeed superbly in attaining its goal, which was to reaffirm the extraordinary innovative advances Beethoven achieved between the masterful apprenticeship of his first Op 18 quartets (published 1801) and the assured and expansive inventiveness unveiled seven years later with the publishing of the Rasumovskys. 

In Kilrenny Church, with Arriaga’s E flat Quartet trumpeting an opening theme brazenly reminiscent of Beethoven’s Op 18 No 1 (a performance frustratingly paused midway due to unseen disruption in the church’s rear balcony), the Cuarteto Quiroga proved themselves the perfect fit for the opening F major Rasumovsky. There’s an element of danger in their demeanour, a degree of raw imperfection – almost deliberately so in some aspects of tuning – that is magically offset by a single-minded togetherness. Such conflict lent a decisive edge to the performance, the rigour of Beethoven’s opening movement deliciously countered by suave Slavonic asides, the nimbleness of the Scherzo tamed by the broad lyrical sweep of the Adagio, the final Allegro brusque and resolute. 

The action then moved to Crail Church, where the Calidore Quartet made the most of the E minor Rasumovsky’s darker hues. The fragmented rhetoric of the opening, gradually mustering an organic flow, elicited meaty ensemble playing from the Americans, a homogeneity recast as devotional calm in the sublime Molto Adagio. They were mesmerising in the off-kilter rhythms of the Scherzo with its pugnacious Russian references, imbuing the final Presto with all the jauntiness it calls for. 

In advance of that, and introduced by the composer himself with the reassurance that “my piece isn’t scary!”, Turnage’s Arietta (an ENF co-commission) opens in the same hymn-like vein as the aforementioned Molto Adagio. It is, appropriately, a homage to Beethoven, the theme of its variations being a literal inversion of the Arietta used by Beethoven in his last Piano Sonata, Op 111. Its gaunt reverence, its gathering warmth, and those hints of neo-classicism coloured by spectral links to the past, gave purpose to its presence in the programme.

The same venue, Crail Church, later welcomed the ebullient Opus13 to round off Saturday’s musical triptych. It took a moment or two for Stenhammar’s substantial A minor Quartet to truly gather momentum, but when it did the performance matured to reveal a lusty allegiance to Brahms and Dvorak, even modal echoes of Ravel and nods to Sibelius. It was hard to ignore the slow movement theme’s unmistakable similarity to  “Climb Every Mountain” from The Sound of Music, but there was much to enjoy in textures that ranged from emulating the whisper of a consort of viols to full-blown passion, and an ending that brimmed with mercurial whimsy.

Then to the last Rasumovsky, and a performance that had us clinging to the edge of our seats. It opened with bristling resolve, struck a graceful balletic note in the Andante con moto, before viewing the unruffled Minuet as an understated springboard to the final fugue, a hair-raising sprint to an explosive conclusion. The audience reacted instinctively, baying for more and receiving it in the form of a simple Swedish folk tune. 

There was an unmistakable buzz to the whole day that was hard to ignore. Chamber music’s central canon has long been a factor in defining the East Neuk Festival. But this package, in particular the thought given to cross-referenced programming and comparative selection of artists, had something very special and enlightening to offer. 

Ken Walton

(Pictured: Opus13 at Crail Church)

East Neuk’s James Oswald

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A concert in this year’s East Neuk Festival celebrates the work of Crail’s forgotten composer, writes Keith Bruce.

It is perhaps surprising that it has taken the East Neuk Festival, headquartered in the picturesque fishing village of Crail for over two decades, this long to celebrate the composer who was born there in 1710.

Local journalist Tom Davison has, however, done his memory – and the festival – proud with a new book, Thank you for the Musick: The Life and Times of James Oswald (The Hardie Press, £15), which is launched by the author on Thursday (July 2) at a concert featuring his music by harpist Karen Marchalsay (pictured) with fiddler Kathryn Nicholl and singer Chris Miles.

Oswald is far from unknown – he is included in the Grove Dictionary of Music and in John Purser’s definitive work on Scotland’s music, and his works have been recorded by Concerto Caledonia amongst others – but he is curiously uncelebrated, especially in his homeland.

His story is certainly a remarkable one. From lowly beginnings, and through troubled times, he made his name firstly in Edinburgh and then in London, and died at 59 as a composer to the Royal court and master of Knebworth in Hertfordshire, a venue more associated with summer concerts by the behemoths of rock’n’roll in recent years.

Davison packs a great deal into his 178-page biography of Oswald, and although he is fond of modestly limiting the scope of his book, and what is beyond it, it is hard to see what could have been added, or what is missed out.

On the music itself he defers to those of greater expertise, but encompasses the full range of opinion over the centuries before coming down firmly on the positive side of the argument. Just as convincingly, and probably of more interest to the general reader, he conjures up a picture of the era, the complexities of its politics and treacherous religious differences, and the fluidity of the class structure at the time, that is as compellingly readable as it is thoroughly researched.

Chapter 15, provocatively titled “Scotophobia”, should be prescribed reading for anyone interested in contemporary politics north of the border. Davison is less impressed than many by 18th century Whig parliamentarian John Wilkes, for example, but concedes his “sharp wit and neat turn of phrase”. Those qualities often distinguish Davison’s own writing, enlivening what could easily have been a dull history lesson.

His book is never that, chiefly because the reflections of our own time are too obvious to ignore. So it is a paradox that it is probably the crucial differences between then and now that account for James Oswald’s neglect.

Although he was a clearly a very original and ground-breaking musician, he worked in an era when originality was less prized, including by himself. His chief interest was in publication rather than copyright and intellectual property, so he was careless of attribution and cavalier with pseudonyms.

Davison takes a chapter to consider the possibility that Oswald composed “God Save The King”, a melody that would surely guarantee his immortality, and wisely concludes that, while the argument is strong, there is no way anyone will ever know one way or the other.

Those “definite maybes” (as one Knebworth headliner might say), all accumulate to create what is surely the fullest picture of The Life and Times of James Oswald that can be painted. With so few hard facts about the composer’s life to go on, Davison’s depth of research and stylish writing contrive to make a convincing character of a major figure and remarkable talent in the history of Scottish music.

Karen Marshalsay’s Looking for Oswald is at Crail Community Centre at 1.45pm on Thursday July 2 as part of the East Neuk Festival, which runs July 1 to 5. Tom Davison’s Thank you for the Musick: The Life and Times of James Oswald is published by The Hardie Press at £15.

John Wallace

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Trumpeter John Wallace, who has died at the age of 76 following treatment for cancer, was one of the most dynamic musicians of his generation. Following a career on the front desks of three London orchestras and the founding of his own brass ensemble, the Wallace Collection, he was appointed principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 2002.

His tenure at the institution, which ran until his retirement in 2014, was transformative, including the name change to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to reflect the expanded range of the teaching portfolio, and the opening of the Wallace Studios next to Scottish Opera’s rehearsal space at Speirs Wharf.

Born in Methil in Fife, John began his musical career playing cornet in his father’s works band, the Tullis Russell Mills Band in Glenrothes. In more recent years he performed alongside current players as one of a series of engagements at the East Neuk Festival.

After the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, he studied music at King’s College, Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music and York University.

A recipient of an OBE in 1995 and a CBE in 2011, he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Music in 2021. He had been a featured soloist alongside Kiri Te Kanawa at the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. He was made a Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society last year.

Professor Jeffrey Sharkey, who succeeded him as RCS Principal, said yesterday: “John Wallace was a legend in the music world – one of Scotland’s own who gave so much to the world as a performer, educator and leader. He was also incredibly warm and approachable.”

During his cancer treatment, John Wallace returned to his first study of composition and gave one of his last interviews to Vox Carnyx last year to publicise a concert featuring his own arrangements in aid of Glasgow’s Beatson Cancer Charity.https://voxcarnyx.com/2025/02/13/inspired-by-adversity/

East Neuk at 20

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At the Opening Concert of this year’s East Neuk Festival, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Principal Guest conductor paused between the first and second movements of Lars-Erik Larsson’s Pastoral Suite to allow a raucous posse of motorcyclists to pass the Bowhouse before the music continued, but Andrew Manze could do nothing to mitigate the noise of a helicopter overhead during the Andante of Schubert’s Symphony No. 6.

Perhaps the pilot was a Stockhausen fan at the wrong gig, because at the closing concert in the same venue, composer Sally Beamish contrived an event as fascinating as the German’s late 20th century experiment with the Arditti Quartet playing in separate aircraft.

Her piece, Field of Stars, had inspiration every bit as complex, and the demanding task of employing four faithful visiting ensembles in a single work. The Belcea, Castalian, Elias and Pavel Haas Quartets were behind the audience as well as onstage, and each cellist was furnished with a tuned bell-cymbal as a call sign for the group’s location.

Just as the farm building was impressively effective for the SCO’s opener – the programme completed by Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez with the soloist another faithful friend of ENF, Sean Shibe – Beamish made her commission a site-specific triumph to end the 20th edition of the festival.

Weaving a tapestry of international melodies into her compact creation, and exploiting many of the techniques of which the string players are capable along the way, it ended with a medieval hymn-tune that vaguely recalled La Vie En Rose. The composition may have been tailor-made for the space, but thoughtful music producers should surely be able to adapt it to other contexts.

The programmatic setting for its premiere could scarcely have been richer. All 16 players made a luxury string orchestra for the Andante Festivo by Sibelius at the start, with the Castalian’s Finnish first violin Sini Simonen appropriately in the position of concert-master.

Her quartet combined with the Belcea for the performance of Mendelssohn’s youthful Octet that closed the concert, with Corinne Belcea in imperious command and the Belcea’s cellist Antoine Lederlin bossing the start of the Presto finale.

The first half had seen the completion of the festival’s cycle of the Late Quartets of Beethoven, the Pavel Haas showing that the complexity of the second and fourth movements of Opus 135 in F defy its “contract-filler” reputation. The emotive slow movement was admittedly waiting in the composer’s bottom-drawer, but we already knew that from the Belcea’s equally heart-breaking rendition of it as an encore to the huge Opus 131 (for which it had failed to make the cut) in Crail Church two days earlier.

The Beethoven journey had begun in Kilrenny Kirk on Thursday with the Elias playing Opus 127 in E-flat, its big opening chords a bit of a red-herring given the intimacy of the long central Adagio and the inventive playfulness of the music in the later movements. Like the Belcea in Crail, the Elias prefaced the Beethoven with Mozart, but the Castalian opened their concert, of Opus 139 with the Grosse Fuge, with Thomas Ades’s seven-movement Arcadiana, Natalie Loughran’s viola leading the way in water-themed music which takes a beguiling turn into the world of tango half way through.

The quartets were far from the only excursion of the festival programme, the most literal being Saturday’s “Shibe Trail” to three places in Anstruther and through music from the early 1600s to the year before last, played on lute, classical guitar and electric guitar and electronics. Each recital was relatively brief but the range of composition, and multi-disciplined virtuosity Sean Shibe demonstrated was fantastic. From John Dowland to Meredith Monk might not actually seem so far in vocal music terms, but to be taken from one to the other instrumentally was a different journey altogether.

The brief life of Franz Schubert was another thread of the 20th East Neuk, including performances of the song cycles by baritone James Newby and tenor Mark Padmore with pianist Joseph Middleton. Newby’s performance of Die Schone Mullerin was too dramatic for some, but his animated storytelling surely cast fresh light on the familiar sequence.

Employing an impressive range of tone and timbre, Newby’s theatrical reading was clearly addressed to listeners and objects alive in his imagination and it was all too easy to see the babbling brook at his feet in Crail Church. The portrait he drew of the protagonist in these poems was often a disturbing one, the fickle girlfriend ultimately incidental to his existential crisis and bitter and disturbed character.

He and Middleton had clearly worked precisely on the pacing and pauses of the recital, and the pianist’s picture-painting was as essential in what was an unforgettable performance.

So too was the Pavel Haas Quartet’s of Schubert’s Quintet from the last year of his life, cellist Ivan Vokac joining the great collaborators. His line was often at the bottom of the instrument’s range and a little like that of a rhythm section string bass, and the whole work was revealed to be as muscular as this group can be relied upon to find in any music. If that was especially true of Janacek’s String Quartet No 1, which opened the quartet’s Crail recital – and of which they are surely the finest exponents – it was revealing how much the Schubert benefitted from the same approach.

Earlier on the Festival’s last day, a gathering of yet more familiar festival faces celebrated the event’s genesis, inspired by the success of a one-off chamber concert at St Ayle in Cellardyke, featuring Beethoven’s Septet of 1800. A supergroup of chamber musicians gathered in the same place to play the same work, the occasion also remembering cellist and teacher David Watkin, and only slightly diminished by some technical difficulties with the instrument of violinist Alexander Janiczek, which discombobulated even this most experienced of players.

(Pictures: Neil Hanna)

Keith Bruce

Scotland’s new arts funding landscape

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Creative Scotland, the arts funding body, has acted to ensure that arts organisations spend less of their time making application to Creative Scotland (CS) for money.

In a widely-welcomed, if overdue, comprehensive realignment of its grants portfolio, making use of £34m increase in the Scottish Government’s budget allocation to culture, a total of 251 organisations now benefit from Multi-Year Funding, 141 of them for the first time. A further 13 are in a “Development” queue with a view to their inclusion in years to come.

The announcement puts a much larger proportion of Scotland’s arts sector on a stable financial footing, with the assurance of CS support for the coming three financial years. It also frees up staff time from the rigours of annual application to the quango, potentially to seek support from other sources.

Among those awarded multi-year funding for the first time were classical music festivals Sound in Aberdeen, Fife’s East Neuk Festival and Ayrshire’s Cumnock Tryst, founded by Sir James MacMillan. Music education initiatives The Benedetti Foundation and Sistema Scotland also now receive a multi-year award, as does the Govan-based Glasgow Barons.

There were increases in support for Orkney’s St Magnus Festival, Scottish Ensemble, Red Note, Paragon and Dunedin Consort.

The largest award goes to the Edinburgh International Festival, whose grant is increased to £3.25m in 2025/26 and will rise to £4.25m in 2027/28. One of the Festival’s most significant partners in recent years, the National Youth Choir of Scotland, also receives an increase of over 70% in its CS award, which is increased to £346,635 annually.

Francesca Heygi, EIF Chief Executive said yesterday: “We are grateful for the International Festival’s uplift in funding, which recognises the unique role we play in connecting Scotland to the world, and gives us a firm foundation from which to build.”

The core grant to the Festival had not been increased since 2008.

Creative Scotland has been unable to match the ambition of Scotland’s arts organisations  as outlined in their funding applications, but those already in receipt of Multi-Year Funding see an average increase of 34% in the coming year, rising to 54% in years to come.

Two classical music organisations, the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and Hebrides Ensemble, were named among 13 recipients from a separate £3.2m Development Stream Fund, with a view to them joining the Multi-Year Funding list in the future.

The loser in the announcement was Cumbernauld’s Lanternhouse Theatre, where Dunedin Consort has developed recent productions and Scottish Opera premiered its latest Opera Highlights tour last week, which has lost its long-term funding, a decision described by chief executive Sarah Price as “devastating”.

Picture: No more cuts? – National Youth Choir of Scotland performing at EIF 2024 (credit Jess Shurte)

East Neuk turns 20

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Tickets are now on general sale for the 20th East Neuk Festival, on Fife’s picturesque Forth estuary shoreline, which includes a celebration of the Elie Church concert that inspired its first programme, featuring some of the players involved in that event. A group led by violinist Alexander Janiczek, former leader of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and including ex-SCO players Ursula Leveaux on bassoon and Alec Frank-Gemmill on horn and current SCO first cello Philip Higham, plays Beethoven’s Septet on the festival’s closing day, June 29. The 2025 performance is at noon in St Ayle’s, Cellardyke.

The main threads of this summer’s bill of fare are the late quartets of Beethoven, the compositions of Schubert and the versatile musicianship of festival regular Sean Shibe.

The Edinburgh guitarist is the soloist for the opening Bowhouse concert by the SCO under principal guest conductor Andrew Manze on the evening of Wednesday June 25. Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is followed by Schubert’s Sixth Symphony. Shibe also gives three intimate recitals in Anstruther venues on Saturday June 28, playing lute, classical guitar and electric guitar.

Three Schubert song cycles are performed over three days in Crail Parish Church, pianist Joseph Middleton accompanying baritone James Newby for Die Schone Mullerin, tenor Mark Padmore for Wintereise and both for Schwanengesang.

The Beethoven quartets are in the hands of the Elias, Castalian, Belcea and Pavel Haas Quartets, all four of whom come together for the closing concert at the Bowhouse, which includes a new commission from composer Sally Beamish, written for four string quartets.

Other attractions include festival debuts for London saxophonist Tom Smith and his Septet and traditional musician Katherine Tickell with her band The Darkening, oud virtuoso Nizar Rohana and jazz pianist Euan Stevenson.

Full details and booking information is available at eastneukfestival.com

East Neuk Festival 2

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Various venues, Fife

What’s the connection between strings, guitar, accordion, church organ and saw? Yes, I said saw – not an implement you expect to see in any normal musical line-up. But then, the music and diversity offered by the East Neuk Festival always has an air of mystique and innovation that sets it apart.

Sunday saw the close of this year’s musical journey, a trip from St Monans to St Andrews via Anstruther that was an utter delight. Duets, ensembles, solo work – whatever the combination and whatever the style of music, from Scarlatti to Philip Glass, it was delivered with the Festival’s customary class.

Classical music can be a serious business, so sometimes needs a lighter touch to break the routine. SCO cellist Su a Lee did just that when she and her long-standing friends – Mr McFall’s Chamber – brought an informal but still strictly professional touch to their Anstruther Town Hall programme. There was tango, both South American and European, North American swing and Elizabethan grace. Su a Lee, on musical saw, gave the performance an unusual but marvellous touch, yet it was one of the more sedate works that took top billing, Piazzolla’s Solitad, which was undeniably beautiful.

Prior to that, in St Monans Kirk, Sofia Ros (accordion) and Morgan Szymanski (guitar) embarked on a tour of Latin American music. Szymanski took the edge in terms of virtuosity – his programme seemed more challenging in that respect – but Ros’ brilliant dexterity shone in two Scarlatti sonatas, the first taken at breakneck speed.

The Festival was rounded off in customary fashion by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, a final concert with a difference as it used the organ in St Andrews’ Holy Trinity Church. It inspired some novel programming, with mixed success. Tom Wilkinson’s performance of Bach’s massive Fantasia and Fugue was impressive and magisterial, but the organ work that complemented it, Philip Glass’ Mad Rush, predictably repetitive, rather outstayed its welcome.

That was a mere blip in an otherwise triumphant programme in which more interesting Glass featured – his  American Seasons – with violinist/director Isabelle van Keulen as soloist. The work was fantastic, a take on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, van Keulen’s solo performance capturing its fervent spirit. It was brilliance personified.

If Glass’ music took prominence, that’s not to say that Britten’s Frank Bridge Variations and Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten were lacking significant presence, superbly performed as one would expect from an orchestra firmly imbedded in the life of this fine Festival.

Garry Fraser

Photo by Neil Hanna

East Neuk Festival 1

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Kilkenny Church / Crail Church

Maybe it was too much to ask of the Scottish weather that the scorcher we’d enjoyed throughout June remain firmly  in place for the 2023 East Neuk Festival. In the event, the close of the month, coinciding with the first two days of the Festival, offered more typical climatic variables – a sizzling Thursday followed by a cool, showery Friday – and so did the music.

Thursday’s performances felt like a congenial warm-up: two really interesting programmes delivered with just a suspicion of settling in – not exactly unexpected after the impact and hangover of Covid. 

First up was a return ENF visit by French-Canadian cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras, a solo recital in the amiable ambience of Kilrenny Church that began in the 20th century – a selection of Geörgy Kurtág’s étude-like aphorisms – and ended with the sanguine Bach Cello Suite in C minor. It was in the former – incendiary miniatures scattered among the progressive Hungarian composer’s output like personal journal entries – that Queyras realised the most positive impact, incisive and colourful interpretations that nailed the ballistic concentration of the music.

Beyond that, Queyras’ playing was probing and eloquent, emotive in its realisation of the inner musings expressed by Turkish composer Ahmet Annan Saygun in his Bach-like Partita for Cello, yet as a consequence, too free in its rhythmic definition, which tended to rob the ensuing Bach Suite, and two other short Baroque pieces, of their natural energy.

There was no lack of oomph in that evening’s Crail Church programme by the Belcea Quartet and Friends, which saw the familiar core ensemble augmented with Queyras and feisty Berlin Philharmonic violist Diyang Mei for a gritty performance of Brahms’ String Sextet No 1 in B flat, prefaced by a bombastic solo performance of movements from Liszt’s Les Années de Pèlerinage Book II by pianist Bertrand Chamanyou.

Chamanyou’s Liszt was epic, power-driven at times to the point of near-destruction, yet shot through with plentiful moments of deep sensitivity and flowing virtuosity to counter its viciousness. The closing Dante-inspired work was a case in point, thrillingly apocalyptic, but edging towards tonal distortion. If the Brahms adopted something of that bravado mentality, it was to mostly positive ends and a performance attuned fittingly to both the music’s homogenous richness and internal strife.

Friday held its own fascination, a thrilling late morning Kilrenny programme by the Castalian Quartet, followed late afternoon by an individualistic solo recital from South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son. 

Previous visits by the Castalian Quartet have been notable for the naturalness with which they strike a classy balance between the individual and the body corporate. Such was the magical essence of a Mozart Quartet in D minor that divulged, through a combination of smiling interaction and devious self opinion, its awakening drama and characterful grace. Fuller passions emerged in the Dvorak, yet enlivened by that same flexible discipline and measured effusion.

Like the Castalians, Yeol Eum Son will be back in Scotland later this summer for the Edinburgh International Festival, which on this evidence will be a starry twin attraction. Son, whose recent recordings of the complete Mozart piano sonatas were singularly impressive, played two of these works in her Crail programme. In the C Minor Fantasy her total immersion in the music was fascinating, at the same time unnerving. She seemed to agonise over the opining of the Fantasy, as if deliberately deconstructing its flow. One the other hand, the C minor Sonata took its natural course, a little short on lyrical inevitability perhaps, but genuinely spirited.

Impetuousness had its place in Janacek’s Sonata No 1 (From the Street), with its disturbing transformations – quite Jekyll and Hyde in character and style – and wild excursions between achingly suspended time and crashing climaxes. Son signed off with exuberant flair in the Sonata No 2 by Ukrainian composer Nikolay Kapustin. It is unadulterated jazz, frenzied improvisation writ large, played here with breathtaking virtuosity and physical abandon. It had its tender moments – a bluesy Largo with super-heated harmonies – but the emphasis was on showmanship, which Son applied full on. She leapt from her stool in the final flurry of madcap glissandi; we all but jumped from our own seats in instant response.

Ken Walton 

Glasgow Cathedral Festival

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Artistic Director Andrew Forbes and his small team achieve a minor miracle each year with their long weekend of diverse and often bold and experimental music in the superb environment of Glasgow Cathedral. Saturday evening’s programme was a good indicator of that range, and the unique atmosphere the building provides.

Cellist William Conway’s Hebrides Ensemble brought a programme that was diverse in itself, beginning with a quartet by Mozart and ending with a work for the same forces by Krzysztof Penderecki – the Polish composer to whose memory Sir James MacMillan has dedicated his new violin concerto.

Although Conway himself played in all but one of the five works, much of the focus in the recital was on Yann Ghiro and Scott Dickinson, principal clarinet and principal viola in the BBC SSO, with violinist David Alberman the other member of this edition of the versatile group.

Mozart’s Adagio for Basset Horn and String Trio might only have become such in the hands of German musicologist Ernst Lewicki, but its melodic material is familiar from the composer’s repurposing of it and the lead instrument is one for which he had a demonstrable enthusiasm.

Penderecki’s Quartet exploits the similar tonal range of the clarinet and viola in its opening and closing movements as the cello and violin add single note “drones” to the sound. The clarinet is also to the fore in the sprightly and slightly bluesy Scherzo; only in the third movement Serenade is there a more democratic share of the lead line.

The other curiosity by a big name was Leonard Bernstein’s Variations on an Octatonic scale, five bite-sized miniatures that fuelled his Concerto for Orchestra. They were performed here by Conway and Ghiro, and the fourth, with its staccato clarinet and pizzicato cello was a particular delight.

The programme was completed by two newer works from composers living or working in Scotland, David Fennessy and Helen Grime. Almost the definition of minimalism and restraint, with much use of harmonics, Fennessy’s Changeless And The Changed is a duo for violin and cello that takes a single musical idea, botanical in inspiration, and explores it thoroughly. To See The Summer Sky, by Grime, pairs violin and viola with the lower instrument often taking the lead, especially in the faster sections of the score.

If the Hebrides’ package presented an opportunity to hear music that rarely has an outing, the event that followed was a one-off delight. De Profundis: A Tribute to Scottish Miners began life at the East Neuk Festival five years ago, performed in smoky half-light in The Bowhouse, the former agricultural building that has become the festival’s main large venue.

This revisiting of the work by John Wallace, his professional brass-playing colleagues in The Wallace Collection, and Tony George, the tuba-playing director of the Tullis Russell Band who is now working with The Cooperation Band, also involved Renfrew Burgh Band. The massed brass also included, unbilled, a few players from Fife who simply wanted to be involved again and were prepared to travel to do so.

If the pit-invoking haze was less dense this time, the lighting and use of the building was twice as spectacular. The score Wallace has created, mining material from settings of Psalm 130, Out Of The Deep, ranges from classic brass band sound to choral polyphony, constantly in flux and with the glorious punctuation of a virtuosic trumpet solo from on high and a robust percussion interlude. From the quire of the cathedral, Brenda Craig recited the four poems that are part of the piece, one of them miner/writer Joe Corrie’s The Image o’ God.

Word had clearly got out that this was a spectacular not to be missed and the Cathedral Festival team were rewarded by a very good attendance for an occasion that will live long in the memory.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Hebrides Ensemble by David Lee

Sean Shibe: Lost & Found

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Pentatone

Edinburgh guitarist Sean Shibe’s second album for Pentatone comes within a whisker of being too cool for school. The label describes it as “an ecstatic journey containing music by outsiders, mystics, visionaries, who often have more than one identity”.

Clocking in at 70 minutes, it would be pushing the envelope for a vinyl release, but is formatted that way, with a clear side one/side two split between Oliver Leith’s Pushing my thumb through a plate (originally written for harp) and Meredith Monk’s Nightfall (composed for voices).

The repertoire runs from Monk’s 12th century forebear Hildegard von Bingen to jazzmen Chick Corea and Bill Evans, by way of mavericks Moondog and Julius Eastman. It’s eclectic certainly, but all in the best possible current hipster taste, perfectly designed to appeal to the audience Edinburgh International Festival director Fergus Linehan astutely identified for the strand of “contemporary music” he introduced to the programme.

It’s also electric, Shibe playing two amplified solid-bodied guitars, through an array of effects, most extravagantly deployed on the earliest music. Recorded less than half a mile from the EIF’s Leith Theatre venue in Great Junction Street, it roams the globe and the repertoire, including a world premiere by Daniel Kidane (inspired by lockdown and sitting nicely amidst Corea’s Children’s Songs) and an arrangement of Shiva Feshareki’s 2018 VENUS/ZOHREH (originally for string quartet).

The latter’s graphic score, and the one for Eastman’s Buddha, are reproduced in the booklet of a package that has the guitarist indulging his cos-play enthusiasm. If you are looking for a precedent for the cover art style of Shibe’s recent output, look no further than Icelandic avant-pop pixie Bjork.

All of which suggest a bold level of ambition, and the undeniable fact is that Shibe pulls it off. His playing is immaculate, and the soundscapes he builds flawlessly constructed, never in any danger of straying into prog excess, and beautifully recorded. The disc is also sequenced with great care, so that the more melodious works arrive at exactly the correct time. Admirers of the guitarist’s acoustic classical work will find much to enjoy, as will those fans less likely to take a cottage in Earlsferry to hear Schubert chamber music at the East Neuk Festival each summer.

In record company marketing terms, Lost & Found is probably a “crossover” album, but one that is far too plugged into the zeitgeist and modern taste to deserve the label. It stands a very good chance of knocking some of the more obvious products bearing that label off their perches in the classical charts, but is well worth an attentive listen anyway.

Keith Bruce

East Neuk Festival (2)

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The piano wove a binding thread through Friday’s and Saturday’s programming at last week’s East Neuk Festival. Not at the expense of the Festival’s wider chamber music focus, but nonetheless intriguing for its variously fashioned pianistic styles and interpretations. And that’s before East Neuk veteran Christian Zacharias made his appearance – one of his last public recitals before retirement from solo performance – on Sunday.

There was an aura of elder statesmanship accompanying the presence of septuagenarian Elisabeth Leonskaja, who starred in two recitals at Crail Church. One was collaborative, teaming up with Dutch violinist Liza Ferschtman and French cellist Ivan Karizna; the other a musical soliloquy featuring the final three Piano Sonatas of Beethoven, a grouping that has been expounded brilliantly in recent years by Scots pianist Steven Osborne.

Those used to Osborne’s sublime sophistication and refined eloquence may have found the drier objectivity of Leonskaja’s Beethoven performances unyieldingly phlegmatic. Yes, she commands a focussed authority that approached its breeziest in the Sonata in E, Op 109, the lyrical expressiveness of the final variations a welcome antidote to the stormy Prestissimo, where Leonskaja’s tendency to thunder out octave bass lines first surfaced.

There was alternating distress and luminosity in the mood swings of the A flat Sonata, Op 110, rocked only by lyrical lines that sold short on silken sustainment. In the final C minor Sonata, Op 111, where the impetuosity of the opening movement found Leonskaja in comfortable territory, she most often internalised the emotional opportunities of the concluding variations, even the exuberance that lights up Beethoven’s before-its-time “boogie-woogie” moment.

That same note of reserve effected a stiffness in Schubert’s Trio no 2 in E flat in her collaboration with Ferschtman and Karizna, despite the constant promise of interactive flair and profusion of passion from the string players. 

The earlier part of that Friday recital opened our eyes to the playful duo compatibility of pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy. Tasked with Schubert’s Allegro in A minor, D947, this proved to be a teasing aperitif to their own Saturday showcase programme, which culminated in the four hands version of Stravinsky’s famously paganistic The Rite of Spring.  

The route to the Stravinsky was just as tantalising, firstly in the mischievously physical and musical interplay of Poulenc’s Sonata for Piano 4 Hands, then in a cheeky alternating juxtaposition of Beethoven’s Op 45 Marches (like nuclear prototypes for his bigger symphonic creations) and several of Kurtag’s tongue-in-cheek piano sketches from his Jatekok series. One in particular of the Kurtag – a fitful “argument” over three simple chromatically-spaced notes – raised appreciative sniggers.

Then the main billing, A Rite of Spring that lacked none of the ritualistic venom, fiery virtuosity  and ballistic rhythmic edge normally associated with the full orchestral version. Tsoy and Kolesnikov invested infinite keyboard colour and energy in a performance that was thrillingly hyperactive and acutely precise. 

Boris Giltburg performed with the Pavel Haas Quartet | Neil Hanna Photography

A similar punctiliousness featured in the pianism of Boris Giltburg, whose Saturday evening programme in Crail with the Pavel Haas Quartet was a masterclass in musical synchronicity. They played two well-matched works from the golden days of European Romanticism, Brahms’ rigorously Germanic Piano Quintet in F minor, complemented perfectly by the Bohemian-scented Piano Quintet No 2 by Dvorak.

It was clear from the outset that mere routine was never on the cards. The Brahms opened teasingly slowly, but quickly accelerated into a slick and dramatically crafted performance, rich in texture and wholesome in scope. Giltburg integrated effortlessly with the off-the-shelf quartet, confidently initiating new directions where it mattered. The same unanimity of purpose brought instant warmth to the Dvorak, its fresher melodic invention a complementary foil to the solidness of the Brahms.

One other key event, a piano-less one on Friday at the Bowhouse near St Monans, focussed on a single masterpiece, Schubert’s substantial Octet, for which the Elias String Quartet teamed up with double bassist Philip Nelson and three highly-prized wind players, Alec Frank Gemmill (horn), Robert Pane (clarinet) and Robin O’Neill (bassoon). Neither the clattering above of a momentary downpour, nor the short while it took for the ensemble to calibrate as a homogenous unit, robbed this performance of its joyous thrills, nuanced generosity and internal cut and thrust. You come to East Neuk mostly for a core helping of mainstream chamber music. It rarely fails to deliver.

Ken Walton

Picture of Pavel Kolesnikov & Samson Tsoy by Neil Hanna Photography

East Neuk Festival (1)

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Although most of its loyal audience comes to the East Neuk Festival to hear world-class performances of classical chamber music in beautiful, intimate acoustics – particularly some of the lovely churches in that corner of Fife – artistic director Svend McEwan-Brown has long since widened the scope of the event to embrace other spaces, outdoor events and contemporary and world music and jazz, and the audience has demonstrated an appetite for those as well.

And while it is a remarkable blessing that some of the first rank performances of the work of Czech composers by members of the Pavel Haas Quartet and pianist Boris Giltburg had previously been heard only by those attending the Prague Spring Festival, ticket-holders were also able to see and hear freshly-minted work make its first-ever appearance.

On Sunday afternoon, the repurposed agricultural shed near St Monans, the Bowhouse, hosted the largest number of musicians it saw over the course of the event when the Scottish Chamber Orchestra played the last of a run of four dates under the baton of its former principal bassoonist, Peter Whelan. For East Neuk they were joined by soprano Anna Dennis, singing two arias from Mozart’s opera Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, with the fullest expression of anguish (in Traurigkeit) and anger (Martern aller Artern). As in the two symphonies on either side of those songs, Haydn’s 82nd “The Bear” and Beethoven’s 8th, the balance in the room and the detail in the performances was superb, the singer and the wind soloists, of which Whelan was once a star member, on top form.

Early on Friday evening, however, the same space had proved just as appropriate for a unique combination of amplified music, juggling and dance under the title Light the Lights, a beautifully presented hour of the music of Bach, Steve Reich and Nico Muhly that was as much a feast for the eyes as the ears.

With the indisposition of guitarist Sean Shibe, the musical responsibility rested on the shoulders of violinist Benjamin Baker, who not only performed that wide compositional repertoire, but was the physical narrative guide through much of it, starting with a Bach-playing amble from the back of the hall that was impressive enough on its own.

Thereafter he was joined by six members of Gandini Juggling who gave visual expression to some of the compositional techniques used by Reich with clubs and balls moving through the air, in and out of synchronicity. At the conclusion of the performance they added a programmed lighting element to the mix for Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, using recorded music.

In between, the jugglers added solo work and a wry nod to Ligeti’s 100 metronomes while Baker played a movement of Reena Esmail’s Darshan and combined forces with dancer James Pett on an interpretation of Muhly’s A Long Line, for violin and electronics. Much of this had a “work in progress” feel to it, but the sense of being admitted to the creative process was the joy of it, especially with the expressive choreography of Pett, who has a hinterland of work with Richard Alston and Wayne McGregor.

Rihab Azar by Neil Hanna Photography

In Anstruther Town Hall on Friday evening, clarinettist Julian Bliss brought a whole suite of box-fresh arrangements by vibraphone player Lewis Wright that extended his jazz excursion into surprisingly contemporary areas. The advance publicity for the Hooray for Hollywood programme had suggested the group was following its acclaimed Gershwin programme with film music from the “Golden Age” of screen musicals. In fact some of the highlights of the set were from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the 2011 movie Midnight in Paris, which adapted Bechet and Django Reinhardt for modern ears. There were classics from the Great American Songbook as well, but Bliss and his cohorts produce a disciplined sound that is a long way from the pub trad band.

As far as East Neuk’s core activity is concerned, this was a year of great riches, with pianists Elisabeth Leonskaya, Pavel Kolesnikov, Samson Tsoy, Boris Giltburg and Christian Zacharias all featured. Leonskaya played Schubert Trios with violinist Liza Ferschtman and young cellist Ivan Karizna in which the beautiful tone of the latter was a discovery, while Kolesnikov and Tsoy explored the same composer’s writing for four hands.

Although no dedication was made, there was surely a nod towards the situation in Ukraine with the Pavel Haas Quartet prefacing its Kilrenny Church concert with Joseph Suk’s nationalist Meditation on the Old Czech Hymn, St Wenceslas. Followed by Korngold’s Quartet No 3 and Janacek’s “Intimate Letters”, this was the Pavel Haas on fertile home territory, the muscular playing of leader Veronika Jaruskova and cellist Peter Jarusek tempered by the newest recruit Luosha Fang, whose viola was so central to the latter.

In Crail Church, the violin and cello couple were joined by Giltburg for two Dvorak trios: the 1876 No 2 is more conventional but less often heard and the 1891 No 4 “Dumky” was given a beautifully-shaped performance, with a particularly memorable steady pulse in the fourth movement. The same venue saw the full quartet joined by Giltburg to play piano quintets of Brahms and Dvorak, as featured on their acclaimed Supraphon recordings.

It is St Ayle Church in Anstruther that often houses other steps away from the mainstream at East Neuk, and it was home this year to the virtuosic oud player Rihab Azar. Combining with bassist Dudley Phillips and percussionist Beth Higham-Edwards, she provided a whistle-stop tour of the contemporary chamber music of Egypt, Iran and her native Syria in a refreshing and relaxing Sunday lunchtime recital that was in some ways a bridge between the core canon of East Neuk and the festival’s more radical exploratory side.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Gandini Juggling by Neil Hanna

Juggling high and low art

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Sean Gandini, founder of Gandini Juggling, talks to KEITH BRUCE about his company’s first appearance at the East Neuk Festival

As many have observed, the pandemic and lockdown restrictions played havoc with perceptions of the passage of time, so that memories of events past can seem more distant or more recent than expected.

Five years ago, in the Dreel Halls in Anstruther, two young musicians played the work of composer Steve Reich in a concert that was to prove more the start of a journey for one than the other, although both have maintained a strong connection with the East Neuk Festival and are part of the 2022 programme.

Guitarist Sean Shibe unveiled elements of his softLOUD project that would go on to wow the Edinburgh Fringe and win him the first of a sequence of awards in its recorded form. Clarinettist Julian Bliss, on the other hand, took a different path by forming a jazz septet. The George Gershwin music he subsequently performed at ENF recently won huge acclaim at London’s Wigmore Hall, and the group brings a new programme of show tunes, entitled Hooray for Holywood, to Anstruther Town Hall on Friday July 1.

Shibe returns this year in the company of violinist Benjamin Baker, both of them former beneficiaries of East Neuk Retreats that enabled the focus on new directions in their music. This year Baker and Shibe are working with ENF debutantes Gandini Juggling on Light the Lights, a son et lumiere combination of music and movement that is another new direction for the festival.

While artistic director Svend Brown has built rewarding loyalties with chamber musicians and ensembles that are the heart of the East Neuk Festival, he has included various non-classical ingredients in the recipe over the years. Visual art, from sand sculpture to film-making, has often been present, while a flirtation with literary events came and went, possibly because of the boom in book festivals at other picturesque locations in Scotland.

This year, as well as jazz and movie music, there is choreography, both from the Daniel Martinez Flamenco Company, who are in the Anstruther venue the evening after Bliss, and from the Gandinis, whose back catalogue has paired their juggling skills with contemporary dance – especially the work of the late Pina Bausch – as well as Indian classical dance and ballet.

Five years ago in Gandini Juggling history, Sean Gandini received a Herald Archangel Award from the Glasgow-based newspaper for his decades of contribution to Edinburgh’s August festivities, and the Angel-winning shows he had brought to the capital. At the time, his group had also recently made a ground-breaking contribution to Phelim McDermott’s acclaimed production of the Philip Glass opera Ahknaten which earned it a Grammy award at the Metropolitan Opera and an Olivier award for English National Opera in London.

Sean Gandini receiving Herald Archangel from Fringe chief executive Shona McCarthy in 2017

When he and I speak, he has just returned from a revival of Ahknaten in New York, and ENO will re-stage the work at the Coliseum next spring. He is now in France, where Lyon’s Les Nuits de Fourviere festival is presenting both parts of the Bausch-influenced shows, Smashed and Smashed 2, together for the first time.

“That is happening at the same time as the Scottish performance which is a much more musical affair,” says Gandini. “We have split the team in two, because we live in an age of extremes and we are now weirdly busy after the pandemic – and one thing we have learned to do is work remotely!” With German juggler Doreen Grossman in charge of realising the ENF project, after Gandini has edited the shape of it via online rehearsals, Light the Lights will premiere at The Bowhouse near St Monans the day before the Gandinis open in Lyon.

“They have had Pina Bausch’s company many times and we will be performing the shows back-to-back at night in a square in front of the opera house where she used to perform.”

The music of Steve Reich is to the fore once more in the East Neuk show, alongside that of Bach, and Grossman will be programming the illuminated juggling to synchronise with the score.

“Light the Lights is a one-off commission, although we have worked before with these light-emitting clubs that are programmed to change colour in time with the music.” Gandini explains.

“It includes Reich’s work with phasing that accelerates a bit of material so that you end up staggered in timing. That is something that is of great interest to us, especially coming straight after working on the Glass. They are so similar and yet so different, those two composers.

“There was dialogue, but it was the Festival that suggested the choice of music and I hope that the show will have a further life, because that is the way that we work. At least elements of it will certainly return because we are working more with live music, and that is so special.”

Beyond any debate is the way that Gandini Juggling has taken the discipline at the heart of its art out of the world of circus and street performance into more exalted company.

“I’d love to do more opera,” Gandini confirms. “There was some suspicion of our involvement in Ahknaten until people actually saw it. It is a very unusual way of using juggling, but then there is a problem of hierarchy in the arts: juggling is lower in the pecking order than opera. Perhaps if Louis XIV had been obsessed with hula-hoops rather than ballet, things might have turned out differently!”

Light the Lights has its first, and so far sole, performance at The Bowhouse on Friday July 1, as part of the East Neuk Festival, June 29 to July 3. Full details of the whole programme are available at eastneukfestival.com

East Neuk 2022

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It’s back to business as usual for the East Neuk Festival, which returns to a live 5-day format this summer (29 June – 3 July) after two years of Covid-inflicted limitations. 

Announcing the 2022 programme this week, founder and artistic director Svend McEwan-Brown promised the event was “poised to deliver our best festival ever” with over thirty events embracing classical music, folk and jazz, pop-up performances, the annual ENF Retreat for young musicians, dancing and juggling, and this year’s collaborative Big Project, Thunderplump. 

The core classical programme follows the ENF’s tried and tested formula, a full diet of chamber music with a particular focus on the piano featuring top international artists and centred around the trio of familiar church venues in Crail, Cellardyke and Kilrenny. 

Elisabeth Leonskaja returns to Fife for the third time with solo performances of Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas, and with violinist Liza Ferschtman and cellist Ivan Karizna in trios by Schubert. Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy add Schubert’s piano duos to the mix, and tackle Stravinsky’s blockbuster Rite of Spring in its dynamic piano duet version. Veteran Festival favourite, Christian Zacharias, will present his last ENF piano recital before retiring as a soloist.

Another pianist, Moscow-born Boris Giltburg, joins members of the Pavel Haas Quartet in trios and quintets by Dvorak and Brahms. The wider chamber music programme features the flexible Magnard Ensemble, the Elias String Quartet, clarinettist Michael Collins, oboist Robin O’Neill and former SCO principal horn Alec Frank-Gemmill.

On a larger classical format, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra performs Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven with soprano Anna Dennis, under the baton of its former principal bassoonist Peter Whelan.  

The town of Anstruther is the hotspot for jazz, folk and traditional music, with programmes that cut across the genres. Kenyan singer songwriter Rapasa Otieno teams up with fiddler-composer Frankie Archer; Syrian oud player Rihab Azar and singer Luke Daniels combine traditional sounds with experimental electronics. Jazz and Middle Eastern music merge courtesy of cellist/improviser Shirley Smart and her trio.

His year’s Big Project, Thunderplump, at the Bowhouse brings together professional, amateur and young musicians and artists for a community initiative involving new and archive film and original music inspired by the unpredictable Scottish weather. Trumpeter John Wallace and Tony George of the Wallace Collection and jazz musician Richard Michael lead a musical conglomerate of 100 young brass players, Fife Youth Jazz and the Tullis Russell Works Band. Curating the event are composer, author and dramatist Neil Brand and filmmaker David Behrens.

Also at the Bowhouse, the ENF’s largest venue, is the collaboration Light the Lights, in which contemporary circus group Gandini Juggling links up with award-winning guitarist Sean Shibe and violinist Benjamin Baker for a one-off multi-genre show.

Performing outside the regular venues and elsewhere in the East Neuk will be Band in a Van, a visible touring presence last year in their converted antique Citroen van, and a big hit with their impromptu pop-up performances.

Full programme details and booking information for the 2022 East Neuk Festival (29 June – 3 July) is available at www.eastneukfestival.com.